Why I Couldn't Start with Lisp

Paul Graham convinced me- Lisp was the way to go. That was half the problem- someone was always convincing me that some other language was the way to go. You guys make compelling arguments. But Lisp, man, Lisp _won_ that debate. I wasn’t an expert… but I felt like everyone else was being unreasonable.

It had everything- it was the most powerful coding language, with the most meta features, and someone good with it could tear a project up even without knowing what they were trying to do ahead of time. Count me in!

I spent at least a year on LISP languages- CL, Scheme, Racket. Took the Wizard MIT course, read EOPL, got to Realm of Racket and finally started to feel some of what I felt like programming should be…

At that point I realized that maybe Lisp was a waste of my time right now. I started the iOS apprenticeship at Bloc and I gotta say, it just _works_.

When i hack together an app, it runs. It runs on my phone. It is easy to try out weird algorithms in it and know I'm not screwing up the boilerplate. It's got dead simple and versatile libraries, and I can find online tutorials in everything, and they work or give me errors that are on stackex.

In short, I can use it right away, and tell my friends, and sell it, and Apple will handle the crazy stuff.

I still have high hopes that in five or six years, when I've made tons of apps and know what these libraries are abstracting away for me, i can come back to Lisp and respect its capabilities.

But as a beginner, I found it just too... useless. It didn't make pretty pictures. It wasn't on my iphone, or browser, or anywhere but in its own REPL. As a beginner, I just couldn't get excited about coding without being able to show it off to people (including myself, at the time) who want to _see_ something.

Please excuse my honesty and inexperience. I thought someone might be interested in a just-starting-out standpoint.